Ancient Civilisations: Six Great EnigmasBy WILL HART & ROBERT BERRINGER

We stand today at an unprecedented turning point in human history. In
recent years two versions of ancient history have formed. One, we shall
call ‘alternative’ history, the other we shall refer to as ‘official’
history. The former ponders over a variety of anomalies and tries to
make sense out of the corpus of evidence, i.e., the pyramids and
timelines, why they were built, by whom and when. The latter conducts
digs, catalogues pottery shards, and tries to defend its proposal there
are no enigmas, and virtually everything is explained.

At one point perhaps as late as fifteen years ago these two camps
seem to be engaged in an informal dialogue. That all changed after, 1)
the Great Sphinx redating controversy caught Egyptologists off guard
and, 2) the impact of Chris Dunn’s book The Giza Power Plant:
Technologies of Ancient Egypt at the end of the last decade.

There is no more dialogue and no more polite, gloves on debate. The
proponents of ‘official’ history have taken an increasingly political
and ideological approach to the issue. They now do little more than
offer pronouncements of the historical ‘truth’ on the one hand, and
denounce of all those who dare challenge officialdom on the other.

In this context we offer evidence that our ‘scholars’, the
gatekeepers who control our institutions of ‘higher learning’, refuse to
consider.

The Great Pyramid – Precision Engineering

This colossal structure, the last of the seven ancient wonders and
the largest stone building in the world, still provokes awe, controversy
and a plethora of theories that inspire bitter debate to this day.
Instead of going over the well-established mysteries, we would like to
shine new light on this important enigma that appears out of place in
‘Stone Age’ Egypt.

The real challenge the Great Pyramid still poses to us in the
opening decade of the Third Millennium is the physical plant itself.
Theorists have gone on endlessly speculating about how it was built and
the metaphysical, cultural and religious significance and/or symbolism
behind its construction. Though several authors have offered tantalising
possibilities, none have been conclusively proven.

The mystery remains unsolved.

To begin with, the massive size – the staggering volume and weight
of the building blocks – remain problematic. With an estimated 2.3
million blocks with a weight of about 4 million tons, the pyramid is
two-thirds the mass of the Hoover Dam. The sheer size and the numbers of
blocks that had to be quarried and moved into place, presents numerous
architectural, construction and engineering headaches.

These issues have been raised time and again, yet are still
unsettled. It is time to move on and define the even more difficult
issues. We consider the core ‘hard’ problems to be those that reflect
precision engineering and assembly line manufacturing accomplished on a
massive scale. The primitive tools scenario concocted by Egyptologists
does not explain the following tasks:

1. Creating precision-cut casing blocks weighing 16 tons, fitted
together and held by a super-glue mortar that maintained a tight seal
forming a nearly seamless shell.
2. Leveling the 13-acre limestone bedrock base to a degree of accuracy
only recently achieved with laser technology.
3. Squaring the base to True North with minimal deviation.
4. Excavating the ‘Descending Passage’ 350 feet into solid bedrock at a
26-degree angle while keeping the tunnel arrow-straight for its length.
5. Bringing the massive 48-story pyramid together around complex
internal structures, retaining the true shape to enable the builders to
form the apex. (These internal structures include four enigmatic
ventilation shafts and a coffer in the King’s Chamber that is too large
to have been moved through the opening. It shows evidence of having been
cut with a jewel-tip saw.)
6. Extensive usage of different types of machined granite inside the
Great Pyramid chambers.

The father of modern Egyptology, Sir Flinders Petrie, marvelled at
the precision and size of the casing blocks. He carefully measure the
blocks and found that “the mean thickness of the joints are .020 and
therefore, the mean variation of the cutting of the stone from a
straight line and from a true square, is but .01 on length of 75 inches
up the face, an amount of accuracy equal to most modern opticians’
straight-edges of such a length.”

The modern international engineering firm of Daniel, Mann, Johnson
& Menendhall conducted a forensic analysis of the Great Pyramid. Their
findings are evaluated in an article published in Civil Engineering.

The pyramid was oriented with its major sides either north-south or
east-west. This in itself was a remarkable undertaking, given the
accuracy to which it was done, because the Egyptians had to perform the
work using astronomical or solar observations – the compass had not yet
been invented. The dimensions of the pyramid are extremely accurate and
the site was levelled within a fraction of an inch over the entire base.
This is comparable to the accuracy possible with modern construction
methods and laser levelling.1

The summary speaks volumes between the lines. The problems with the
Descending Passage are numerous. For starters the tunnel is less than 4
x 4 feet, enough for no more than one excavator wielding a hammer-stone
at any given moment. How would our proposed digging crew negotiate the
space in the suffocating darkness once they had dug down 50 feet and
more? In addition how would the 26-degree angle be set and maintained
without lights or levels? The lack of carbon deposits on walls and
ceiling indicate that torches were not used.

Once again, Petrie measured the passage and found an amazing
accuracy of .020 of an inch over 150 feet and a mere .250 inch over 350
feet of its constructed and excavated length. We submit that this
passage with its smooth surfaces, squared shape, and accurate angle
could not have been tunnelled with primitive tools and methods.

The Great Pyramid remains the world’s greatest wonder and ancient
enigma. We suggest researchers should pay more attention to these
details and ask about the materials used inside the Great Pyramid,
especially near the ventilation shafts. We now have two doors blocking a
very important shaft, the one that pointed to the star Sirius in 2450
BCE.

The Origin Of Dogs – Biogenetic engineering

Now we turn to a mystery that nearly equals the pyramid, though it
is a little known conundrum hidden in the mists of remote antiquity. Let
us start with a simple question that appears to have an obvious answer:
what is a dog? It turns out geneticists in the past decade have shown
the answer is not so obvious. In fact, generations of anthropologists,
archaeologists and wildlife biologists turned out to be dead wrong when
it came to the origins of “man’s best friend”.

Prior to DNA studies conducted in the 1990s, the generally accepted
theory posited that dogs branched off from a variety of wild canids,
i.e., coyotes, hyenas, jackals, wolves and so on, about 15,000 years
ago. The results of the first comprehensive DNA study shocked the
scholarly community. The study found that all dog breeds can be traced
back to wolves and not other canids. The second part of the finding was
even more unexpected – the branching off occurred from 40-150,000 years
ago.

Why do these findings pose a problem? We have to answer that
question with another question: how were dogs bred from wolves? This is
not just difficult to explain, it is impossible. Do not be fooled by the
pseudo-explanations put forth by science writers that state our Stone
Age ancestors befriended wolves and somehow (the procedure is never
articulated) managed to breed the first mutant wolf, the mother of all
dogs. Sorry, we like dogs too, but that is what a dog is.

The problems come at the crucial stage of taking a male and female
wolf and getting them to produce a subspecies (assuming you could tame
and interact with them at all). Let us take this one step further by
returning to our original question, what is a dog? A dog is a mutated
wolf that only has those characteristics of the wild parent, which
humans find companionable and useful. That is an amazing fact.

Think about those statements for a moment. If you are thinking that
dogs evolved naturally from wolves, that is not an option. No scientist
believes that because the stringent wolf pecking order and breeding
rituals would never allow a mutant to survive, at least that is one
strong argument against natural evolution.

Now, if our Paleolithic ancestors could have pulled off this feat,
and the actual challenges posed by the process are far more taxing, then
wolf/dog breeders today certainly should have no problem duplicating it.
But like the Great Pyramid, that does not seem to be the case. No
breeders have stepped up to the plate claiming they can take two pure
wolves and produce a dog sans biogenetic engineering techniques.

The evolution of the domesticated dog from a wild pack animal
appears to be a miracle! It should not have happened. This is another
unexplained enigma.

Mohenjo Daro – Civil Engineering

Since indoor plumbing did not arrive in modern societies to any
extent until the 20th century, and urban planning has still not been
adopted much to this date in history, what we find in the ancient city
of Mohenjo Daro is anomalous indeed.

This city in the Indus Valley was built on a grid system about
4,500 years ago, obviously planned out and drawn up before the first
brick was laid. It had houses, some with indoor plumbing, a granary,
baths, an assembly hall and towers all made out of standard size bricks.
The streets were about eight to ten feet wide on average, and were built
with well-engineered drainage channels.

Mohenjo Daro was divided into two parts; the Citadel was on the
upper level and included an elaborate tank called the Great Bath that
was made of fine quality brickwork and drains. The Great Bath was 40
feet long and 8 feet deep, a huge public facility by any standards. A
giant granary, a large residential building, and several assembly halls
were also on this upper level.

The Great Bath was made watertight by the use of two layers of
brick, lime-cement and then finally sealed with bitumen (tar). The bath
included a shallow section for children.

We should wonder how an ancient culture of which nothing is known,
not even their language, created this sophisticated city at a point in
time many thousands of years ahead of the curve? Civil engineers do not
crawl out of thatched-roof huts able to draw up plans for a complex
urban environment. We need to address the following question to
archaeologists and historians:

1. Where are the cities that demonstrate the path of urban development,
social and technical organisation, leading to Mohenjo Daro?
2. How do you explain the sudden emergence of a complex society when
99.99% of the rest of humanity were living primitively?

These issues cannot be brushed aside with some arrogant pretence
that the questions have already been addressed and answered by digging
up and labelling pottery shards and other artefacts. We have been and
are being overly indulgent with our “soft sciences” regarding their
cavalier assertions about having all the answers. In fact, they have
very few, so why are they throwing stones at independent researchers
from behind glass towers?

Extraordinarily little is known about the Indus Valley civilisation
that once spanned nearly a thousand miles with other cities matching the
description of Mohenjo Daro.

We file this under our list of great enigmas and challenge orthodox
scholars to prove differently as with the first two of our mysteries.

We note that the Indus Valley civilisation was contemporary with
the Great Pyramid. It is often said this was one of the first three
civilisations, having a written script that has never been deciphered.
Now we turn next to the mother of all civilisations, Sumer.

Sumeria – The Source Of Civilisation

Are we missing something or are our historians looking at our
earliest civilisations through a strange and distorted lens? Like Egypt
and the Indus Valley, the biblical ‘Land of Shinar’ – the birthplace of
Abraham – was a brutally hot, largely barren, empty desert with a mighty
river cutting a swath through it. Does this sound like the magnet that
would attract late Stone Age tribes to hunker down and pull wonders out
of a hat?

In fact, historians thought Shinar was a piece of biblical fiction
until the mid-19th century, but now they know everything about it with
complete certitude that we, the unwashed masses, dare not question.
Nonetheless, we encourage readers to maintain an attitude of healthy
skepticism and dare to question ‘official history’.

As is the case with the culture that built the cities of the Indus
Valley, no one knows who the ancient Sumerians were or where they came
from. They called themselves ‘the black-headed ones’ and spoke a strange
language that was unrelated to the languages of the Semitic tribes in
the region. Some linguists note a similarity between the Sumerian
language and that of the Basques, another anomalous culture.

We find it curious that any primitive peoples would choose the
rigours of a hostile desert environment to settle in and build a
civilisation. Why not a gentle river in a forested mountain valley?
Especially in light of the fact that Sumeria contained very few
resources, no forests, no minerals, not even the rocks that were
plentiful in Egypt.

How are we to explain the fact this mysterious culture managed to
invent all of the core components of civilisation under such restrictive
conditions? It occurs to us that a culture would need minerals like
copper, gold, silver and tin immediately available to experiment with
over the course of generations in order to create process metallurgy.
There is nothing simple or accidental about making the connection
between raw ores, the metals they contain, and how to reduce them out of
their native state using high heat.

Nevertheless, the Sumerians not only figured out geology, how to
obtained the ore, knew the levels of heat needed and how to build kilns
to achieve it, they also took very different metals and created the
first alloy, bronze. As metal-smiths were performing these feats, other
citizens were apparently creating the wheel, building cities, ziggurats,
inventing writing, movable type, the ox-drawn plow, cereal crop
agriculture, and advanced mathematics, to mention the most notable of
their innovations.

Something is wrong with this picture. Most human beings were
counting using their fingers, if at all, hunting animals and gathering
plants for their meals. Yet, we find the Sumerians in classrooms
learning the principles of the sexigesimal math system. Yes, the very
same 60-base system we use today to keep track of hours, minutes and
seconds. This advanced system was the first to reveal that a circle has
360 degrees and can be subdivided using 60, 30, 15, 12, etc., all
fractions of the root number.

Teotihuacán – Anomalous Technical Evidence

Teotihuacán, in Mexico, is an immense, even overwhelming
archaeological site, oriented along a twin axis. In the 1960s a team of
archaeologists and surveyors mapped out the entire complex in great
detail. The resultant map revealed an urban grid centred around two
principal, almost perpendicular, alignments.

From the Pyramid of the Moon at the north end, the complex extends
south along the Avenue of the Dead beyond the Ciudadela and Great
Compound complexes for about 3.2 kilometres. To this north-south axis we
must add an east-west alignment that led from a point near the Pyramid
of the Sun to a spot of prime astronomical significance on the western
horizon.

Anthony Aveni, an astronomer-anthropologist, discovered that on the
day the Sun passes directly overhead in the spring of the Northern
Hemisphere (May 18), the Pleiades star cluster makes its first annual
predawn appearance. It was at this point on the western horizon that the
Pleiades set, and the builders aimed the east-west axis.

Additionally, the Sun also sets at this point on the horizon on
August 12 – the anniversary of the beginning of the current Mesoamerican
calendar cycle (5th Sun) – determined by a consensus of academic and
independent scholars to have begun on August 12, 3114 BCE.

It is very clear Teotihuacán was laid out according to a set of
alignments that reflected celestial, geographic, as well as geodetic
relationships. Walking along the avenue from one pyramid to another, up
the steps to the top, and surveying the site from a multitude of angles,
one is struck by the sense of being in the middle of some vast geometric
matrix.

Teotihuacán was the first true urban centre in the Americas. At its
peak around 500 CE, it boasted a population of an estimated 200,000.
George E. Stuart, archaeologist and the editor of National Geographic
magazine sums up our ignorance:

We speak of it with awe, as we do the pyramids of Egypt, but we still
know next to nothing about the origins of the Teotihuacános, what
language they spoke, how their society was organised, and what caused
their decline.2

As for one the most anomalous of artefacts on the planet, in the
1900s archaeologists discovered a sheet of mica in the upper tiers of
the Pyramid of the Sun. This was no ho-hum pottery shard to catalogue
and file away in a dusty box, yet that is about how archaeologists
treated the find. To anyone with even a smattering of technical
knowledge, discovering a large sheet of mica in an ancient pyramid site
comes as a shock. In fact, it is one of the great ‘smoking guns’ that
turn archaeologists mum.

Mica is an inflammable and non-conductive mineral that grows in
fairly weak plate-like structures. It is not at all useful as a
structural building material. NASA uses it as a radiation shield in
space vehicles. Mica is also utilised in electronic components and
microwave ovens, and it is a good shield for electromagnetic radiation,
like radio waves. Like the Great Pyramid, the Pyramid of the Sun has a
subterranean cavity under the middle of the pyramid. A large pyramid
with layers of thick mica would be an excellent EMI shield.

Its placement in the complex raises questions that we could only
answer today after the development of electronic, atomic and space age
technologies.

Thick sheets of mica were also found by archaeologists about 400
meters down the avenue from the Sun Pyramid, these precision-cut sheets
were of considerable size: 27.5 meters square. They were located under a
rock-slab floor of a complex now called “the Mica Temple”.

What possible reason could the builders have had for including a
layer of mica in any structure? It was obviously not decorative. To add
greatly to the growing mystery, the particular mica used was traced to
Brazil. Now we are getting in deep. How would a supposedly indigenous
“Stone Age” culture know that mica existed 3200 kilometres away in the
jungles of Brazil? Not only that, how did they transport these large
sheets over that long distance intact without wheeled vehicles? Surely
not via relay teams on foot travelling overland! No large seagoing boats
or ports have ever been found in ancient Mexico.

High Technology In Stone Age Peru

Lake Titicaca borders Bolivia and Peru in the Andes. The highest
large lake in the world, there are many signs it was once exposed to the
ocean. Megalithic structures like the Gateway of the Sun in Tiahuanacu,
Bolivia, also indicate a long lost past. The gateway was carved out of
one solid block, the hard way to make a gate.

Moving northward near Cuzco, Peru, we find even more large,
impressive and mysterious structures. Here we find walls built with
complex jigsaw type megalithic blocks similar to the more familiar walls
found at nearby Machu Picchu. Some of the megalithic structures contain
complex cut-rocks weighing over 100 tons; a few were joined together by
bronze clamps. Some of the bronze had obviously been poured in place, a
skill not available in pre-Columbian Peru.

Like Sumer, the high Andes is an unlikely location for Stone Age
cities, evidence of advanced technologies, and seminal agricultural
discoveries. It is well established that the region around Tiahuanco, at
12,500 feet elevation, had been turned into a highly productive
agricultural zone. That was achieved by the building of dikes, dams,
canals and raised beds that created microclimates which protected the
plants from frost.

We have attempted to show our planet is full of ancient wonders and
mysteries that have yet to be solved. You can find more information as
well as our theories on who and what created these enigmas in our books,
The Genesis Race (by Will Hart) and Ancient Gods and Their Mysteries:
Will They Return in 2012 AD? (by Robert Berringer).

WILL HART is a journalist, photographer, and filmmaker who has
investigated ancient mysteries and evidence of extraterrestrial
intervention on Earth since 1969. He lives in Arizona, USA. Will’s web
site is
www.genesisrace.com. His new
book, The Genesis Race: Our Extraterrestrial DNA and the True Origins of
the Species, is available from New Dawn Book Service for $39.95. Send
payment to: New Dawn Book Service, PO Box 758, Cleveland QLD 4163.